Lion’s Mail dredges up the past

People have long held the notion that the Mac is geared towards the “creative” mind, although usually they are referring to graphic artists using applications such as Photoshop, Painter, Illustrator and such to help express their creativity. However, with Lion, it is Apple’s OS itself that is forcing us to be creative, or, more specifically, its updated Mail app. Take a look at the screenshot below of an exchange between my wife and I.

What you are seeing is her sending me an e-mail with the subject “Wow”, then letting me know that it is hot outside. This is of course vital information for someone such as myself who works in an underground bunker, devoid of any hint of a window. But then also notice that Mail has decided that her message is a continuation of a conversation she started back in 2008 when she sent me a picture of Target’s Halloween displays, featuring Halloween-themed Domo dolls hanging from the ceiling (ALSO another very important e-mail) with the same subject.

So it looks like we’re going to have to start being a bit more creative with our e-mail subject headings if we don’t want Mail to start grouping new e-mails with things from 3 years ago.

Or, we could uncheck the “include related messages” box in Mail’s prefs. (below)

So, has this happened to anyone else? Feel free to do a test and let me know.

Comments

This is particularly annoying with Amazon’s auto-confirm emails, because they all have the exact same subject:
“Your Order with Amazon”. This becomes a big issue when you order the same thing multiple times (in my case, because I realized it was shipping to the wrong address and wouldn’t let me change the address, so I canceled the order and made a new one for the correct address.)

Yes. I’ve experienced this with the Subject lines of email messages I receive from website forms. Normally, I set these to be the same (like “Website Contact Form”, etc.) but, because this makes the Subject line identical in all these messages, Mail.app will chain them together into a single conversation thread. I like that option in other emails, but not in this particular case. I worked around this by appending the current date/time to the Subject line in order to make each Subject line unique.

I’ve had this happen to me too. Pre-Lion even, it’s not a new ‘feature’. It was two emails from two different people, but the subject was the same. And there was at least a 4 year gap between the them, I guess Apple assumed that people clean out their messages more often than that? I was surprised that Mail doesn’t bother to compare the senders, seems kind of lazy… or shortsighted.